Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview now available to download

Microsoft has made the customer preview of the upcoming Office 2013 suite available for download. Being cloud based, Microsoft has decided to integrate both SkyDrive and Skype into the suite and offer more social functionality to end-users. Signing into your Live / Microsoft Account, you'll be able to store and access documents on the cloud from any supported platform, including Windows Phone.

As well as more optimisation, Office 2013 has also gone 'Metro' with emphasis on simplicity to create an immersive experience. We've installed Office 2013 on our machines and boy does it install promptly. We didn't even have time to make a second cup of tea before it was all set up and ready to go. The suite includes Access, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher and Word.

Please note that instead of that weird click-once web installer posing as Office365 (which is bull, cause O365 is an online service and not an office suite) you can get a classic Office Pro Plus installer from MSDN or TechNet along with Visio and Project 2013 Preview. Oh, and ProPlus now comes with Lync client included.

Are these programs allowed live tiles? Without that, Outlook seems great but compared to Messaging and Email and Calendar and People built into Windows 8 it seems a little mixed up. Everything else is great though. But this one part needs to be streamlined.

Using it now and it looks and behaves nicely. I hope my IT dept. allows me to upgrade my work laptop. We are still using XP. Knowing that XP is slowing losing support, IT dept is slowly rolling out W7.

Cam someone help me...i downloaded the preview testing it out and I run into a prob...i accessed a power presentation using my windows phone that I saved to SkyDrive, upon making changes to it on my windows phone and tried to save back to the cloud...i get an error saying this presentation is cabt be modified and is locked by the user....or something like that...how do I give myself access to my own file that im retrieving it from my phone using the same account...?!?! lol

I have no problem with the functionality of Outlook 2010 connected to my Exchange account either. Specifically what I refer to is how Outlook 2010 interacts with POP accounts (which I have for personal use) and its, IMHO, horrid interface. I "upgraded" from Office 2007 about a year ago, but still use Outlook and OneNote 2007 because both are superior products to the upgraded versions.

I just played with it for about 10 minutes, but I like it so far. I have been wanting to embed video FOREVER, so I love that feature. I hope the provide an addon for older versions so that it doesn't just link to open a browser window.

No they will not, they will just deactivate your product when the real version comes out so it continues to ask you to upgrade or something like that, just like they do for every other preview of windows or office.

A company trying to make money, who would have thought.
Its not like Apple charge you double for basically an Intel based PC wrapped in Alimimium.
Or charge 100 pounds for a Macbook battery, or 70 pounds for iPhone battery replacement.
Really, this childish MS bashing went out of fashion in the 1980s, or didn't you hear? M$ no longer has Bill Gates at the helm to bash. Yeah, see, we've heard all this juvenile claptrap before. Get over it, companies make money.

Dunno, but I have a feeling it'll be a while. And it seems like if any this will be the last Mac version as the next version will be cloud only no doubt.. And Apple would want you to be using iCloud which is not supported I am guessing.
So it's ' So long and thanks for all the fish' then eh..;)

I do agree with that iCloud statement but in the Consumer Preview for Office 365 Home Premium it says
"Coming soon, with the full release of Office 365 Home Premium:
Talk to anyone using Skype, including 60 minutes of free international calls every month to landlines in over 40 countries and to cell phones in 7 countries. (Skype account required. Excludes special, premium and non-geographic numbers.)
Get an additional 20 GB of SkyDrive online storage for easy access and sharing of your documents
Office for Mac"
From that one can assess that it will come out with some kind of preview or actual realease for mac when it is fully released as a pay to download program right?